Today Dave Snowden has published a significant post outlining his team’s work and thinking about safety: “we must stop trying to write better rules and start building better processes for rapid decision-making in each unique context.” Taking a complexity view on safety is essential. Organizational life, when it separates accountability from decision making by downloading simplistic accountabilities to front line workers while constricting their ability to respond appropriately, is full of structurally dangerous situations. Dave’s encouragement to look at the substrate for action is exactly right.
Last month Ted Gioia published a post wondering if we hadn’t reached the top of a stock bubble. Just leaving this here in case I want to come back to it.
At Game of the People, one of my favourite football blogs, guest writer Laura Joseph gives us a run down of the current bubble in football and why football economics is a little different from the bubble Gioia writes about.
A couple of films to look out for from Dana Solomon. The first Blood Lines deals with themes of belonging and family in a Metis setting and stars Solomon in the lead role. I love that the film includes Michif dialogue. The second is Solomon’s full directorial debut, Niimi (She Dances) is about an Indigenous ballerina who recovers her sense of self and love of her art after a traumatic episode. Both seem resonant with the themes Michelle Porter explores in the book I’m currently reading, A Grandmother Begins the Story.
I found myself in Snug Cove today, the village centre of our island, and it was like night and day from this past weekend. As everyone who lives in a place that is overrun by visitors knows, the day after Labour Day is like the dawn of a new era. I knew almost everyone in the Village Square, and had enough time to have actual conversations with friends. I saw people I haven’t seen since the wet months, who finally ventured into the Cove for supplies. It has been a busy summer with people visiting the Island from near and far. Lots of folks coming from Vancouver and environs and even further afield in Canada, because people are avoiding travel to the USA these days.
Bowen Island is not an easy place to learn how to get around. We have an arcane ferry marshalling system that runs on a secret code of etiquette that not even islanders agree upon. Many maps and navigations apps don’t work on Bowen, and many people don’t know how to read paper maps, so it’s common to find folks far from where they want to go. E-biking is all the rage but we don’t have great bike infrastructure, and so the roads can get clogged. Restaurants are good, but they are slower than what you expect on the mainland, and folks that are already frustrated with their inability to have Bowen makes sense to them sometimes take it out on our servers and shop keepers. There is an energy of confusion, self-interest (“Influencers.” Please.) and speed in the summer that causes many of us to stay away from the village unless absolutely necessary.
But then Labour Day passes. Suddenly school has started, people have returned home, the only visitors are seniors who are slow enough to begin with that they have no trouble fitting into the island’s pace. And it feels like ours again.
On Sunday I led an impromptu group of Islanders in an annual ritual to sing off our visitors for another year. It was offered in good fun and received that way I think.
Today was a sweet relief.
My friend Amy Mervak, a great facilitator in Kalamazoo, Michigan, shares a bit about using Critical Uncertainties, a Liberating Structures method, that helps a group quickly design and discuss future scenarios.
Chris Mowles takes aim at the ratings culture that is creating yet one more way for folks to experience precarity in the world. 5/5 for the post!
I’ve just unsubscribed from a blog – well, a substack – which had some promise but let me down in two ways. It had promise becasue it was devoted to facilitation. Where it let me down is that I suspect the posts were mostly ChatGPT generated. The posts were shallow, used emojis liberally, and, the kicker, only allowed paid members to comment. Sorry, but no. The last post I read there, from today was entitled “When Your Virtual Co-Host Gets Smarter Than You” and I suspect that the AI wrote it unironically. I wouldn’t normally make a big deal about unsubscribing from a blog, but when you prompt a comment with “What helps you stay human, while tech manages the rest?” on an AI-generated post and then only allow paid subscribers to discuss, then you’re not really “facilitating” are you? We need to do better.
Alberta populism has deep origins in a group of people who have long harboured a libertarian utopia for Alberta. Danielle Smith is the most recent manifestation of this wave of thought. The Jacobin traces her origin story.
My first connection to the internet was made using a second-hand IBM 386 through a dialup modem to the National Capital FreeNet in early 1994. I was an avid reader of several Usenet groups related to cooking, hiking and some of the social and political issues of the day. I was reminded of that great initiation to internet culture when reading this blog post which envisions a kind of barely adjacent, but now out of reach, timeline for how the internet might have developed if Salvador Allende had remained in power in Chile in 1973. Seriously.
While we are contemplating scenarios, how about one that places the crash of the US economy and political system in 2026. It’s a hastily constructed work of fiction, but it underscores how many things COULD go wrong to kick off an era of transformation. I found myself contemplating the position of lots of other people in this story, folks trying to scrape together rent, people who had just quit their jobs for a new opportunity or retirement, a new citizen…
This is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and Rebecca Solnit is a good person to guide us through the stories and the spiritual meaning of what happened in New Orleans that week and afterwards.
It’s Labour Day. Be kind to those who have to work so you can have a holiday that was hard won by workers. And maybe listen to some great reinterpretations of Juan Carlos Caceres tango music from Le Collective Tango Negro Ensemble.
An astonishing photograph from the Very Large Telescope this week of a planet being born. From the link:
At the center of this frame lies a young Sun-like star, hidden behind a coronagraph that blocks its bright glare. Surrounding the star is a bright, dusty protoplanetary disk— the raw material of planets. Gaps and concentric ringsmark where a newborn world is gathering gas and dust under its gravity, clearing the way as it orbits the star. Although astronomers have imaged disk-embedded planets before, this is the first-ever observation of an exoplanet actively carving a gap within a disk — the earliest direct glimpse of planetary sculpting in action.
Downhill mountain biking is huge here on the south coast of British Columbia. As a young rider for years my son built trails and maintained a few here on Bowen Island. His mentor and inspiration was our neighbour Dangerous Dan Cowan, an absolute legend of North Shore style trail building who built unreal structures here. The history of mountain bike trail development is a folk tradition here. Mountain Life lifts the cover on some that hidden history.
In this ongoing story about Alberta schools banning books, the Alberta premier today had this response to the list prepared by the Edmonton School Board:
“Edmonton Public is clearly doing a little vicious compliance over what the direction is,” Smith said during an unrelated news conference. If they need us to hold their hand through the process to identify what kind of materials are appropriate … we will more than happily work with them to work through their list, one by one, so we can be super clear about what it is we’re trying to do,” Smith said.
The term is “malicious compliance” and it is an excellent tactic. It will be good to see exactly how the premier wants her party’s bigotry expressed in public schools. Here’s the ministerial order, which makes pretty steamy reading on its own.
A wake up call for Tottenham this morning. After a season start with two clean sheets, we met a determined Bournemouth side who brought their high pressing game to North London. After they scored an early goal they kept on going and put Spurs into a slow, defensive, and reactionary torpor. It wasn’t until 77’ that Spurs found some life. Still, some slow decisions and poor passing compromised our ability to take advantage of Bournemouth’s fatigue. We only managed one shot on target, five overall. The Cherries saw out the match with grit and determination and raw belief ,holding on for the win. They played out of this world.
A propos of yesterday’s post on strategic planning, Cameron Norman has a nice post today on working with organizations as a consultant engaging in strategic design and helping contracted work land and be integrated within client organizations.
My buddy Tenneson is inviting a little weekly practice with his Wander Wednesday series. Today he asks What is a gift of slowing down for you? I’m about to join him on a call with a client in the next hour, so this little space here, a chance to read inspiring bits from my blogroll and take a moment to reflect on them without just scrolling by, that is the gift. In face since I’ve been blogging nearly daily again since June, I find that this practice has slowed down how I consume the great ideas that surround me and invited me to reflect on them. I’m not really writing for anyone other than me (but I hope if you drop in here you also find stuff that resonates with you). The gift of slowing down is the chance to try things on. Like I’m looking at some really nice shirts on the rack at the store, but unless I can see how they look on me I may never remember that I saw them. And the way my brain works, it’s not a slam dunk that anything I post here or reflect upon will stick, but by writing about things – by ACTUALLY engaging – I get to try them on.
Do things because they are just worth doing. Not everything nets you a return. Blogging is to social media what hiking is to commuting I think.